


Might Do This to Myself

by iodhadh



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Brooding, Character Study, Laundry, M/M, Post-Act 2 Romance Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-02 00:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11497872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iodhadh/pseuds/iodhadh
Summary: Fenris is not particularly keen on dwelling on his thoughts of Hawke, and if cleaning the blood off his armour and washing his clothes is the best way to distract himself—well, it's not like he has anything better to do.





	Might Do This to Myself

**Author's Note:**

  * For [niemaodpowiedzi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/niemaodpowiedzi/gifts).



> For Gray, who asked me for Fenris and laundry-related mishaps, and was probably not expecting such a goofy prompt to turn into this maudlin mess.
> 
> The title is from the song One Love by Marianas Trench, go listen to it and have feelings about Fenris with me.

The door slammed behind him.

The mansion seemed to echo with it as Fenris strode inside, stalking through the foyer and the great hall. He didn’t pause to look at his surroundings, stepping unseeing over a desiccated corpse, avoiding the shards of shattered glass by long habit, and at last gaining the security of the enclosed back room he had claimed for his own, where he immediately grabbed a chair and threw it against the wall. He was exhausted, emotionally wrung out, and covered in blood. It had been a wreck of a day, and it was barely midafternoon.

He’d thought killing slavers would help. In fact, there were very few situations, in Fenris’s view, that could not be improved by killing whatever slavers he could get his hands on. And it _had_ helped—for a little while. His satisfaction at their deaths and the physical effort of it had briefly been enough to overwhelm the turmoil in his mind. But then his thoughts had turned to the last time he had gone hunting—the slavers’ caves he had carved his way through with Hawke and Isabela and Aveline, and all the things Hadriana had threatened and promised, and the way Hawke had tried to comfort him afterwards—and his mood had come crashing back down again.

He had left. He had walked away from Hawke and all the comforts he could offer. He had ached to do it, and every day—every hour—that passed, he asked himself if he had made the right choice. And every time, he circled back around to the same conclusion. He could see no other course. He could not lose himself in Hawke. Not when he was still struggling to make a life he could truly call his own.

Yet still the Maker-cursed mage haunted his every thought.

Feeling his mind once again falling onto that familiar spiral, Fenris snarled out loud. Enough— _enough_. He had practical concerns. He would tend to those, instead.

Most of the blood on his armour was, fortunately, not his own, but he did have a bare few cuts and scrapes to bind. He hunted through the room until he came up with a ragged handful of bandages, then fought his way out of the plating and its blood-crusted leather underlayer to tend to his injuries, sacrificing one of the worse bottles of wine to the cause of rinsing them out.

That gave him fifteen minutes of respite from his thoughts. Satisfied that he had done what he could, he turned to gather up the armour and drag it down to the kitchens. He needed to clean it: while he may not have cared to look after the house, his armour was a different story. His survival depended on it—and, unlike everything else in this godforsaken mansion, it belonged to him.

There was still a basin of water half full on the kitchen table; Fenris dumped his armour next to it and found a rag, wetting it and scrubbing and rinsing and re-wetting until the water was a dull red and every inch of his leathers was cleaned. He carried the basin to the back door, dumping it out and watching it trickle off down the gutter. Then, in only his leggings and the thin white tunic he wore under his armour to keep it from chafing, he set off down the alleyway to collect a fresh basin from the public fountain. The rest of his clothing could probably stand to be cleaned as well, and it would give him something else to do.

Back inside, he stripped off his under-tunic and smallclothes and threw them into the basin, and then, as an afterthought, untied the strip of red fabric from the wrist of his gauntlet; it wasn’t as badly off as his armour had been, but it, too, had taken its share of blood. He tried not to think about it as he dropped it into the basin. He had put it on in a stupid whim, made his unspoken declaration of attachment, and part of him couldn’t help but wonder if it was just making everything worse, for him and Hawke both—but at the same time, something in him balked at the idea of removing it.

That, too, he tried not to think about.

His self-appointed task complete, he left his clothes soaking in water and lye and returned to the bedroom. He still had half a bottle of wine up there, and even the worst of Danarius’s cellars was perfectly drinkable. To tell the truth, Fenris could barely tell it from the best.

When he came back two hours later, his head now buzzing pleasantly, he thought perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him. But, no, that was nonsensical: he wasn’t _that_ drunk. He wondered then if there might not have been more blood on his clothes than he had expected—but the water wasn’t the right colour for that either. He had certainly seen enough blood this afternoon to know.

It was only when he pulled his under-tunic from the basin that he realized the red cloth from his wrist had leached dye into the water. His tunic and his smallclothes both, previously plain undyed cotton, were now tinted a faint, delicate pink.

For a moment all he could do was stare at the shirt in his hands, standing stock-still in the middle of his ruined kitchen as it dripped unchecked all over the table. Then, absurdly, he began to laugh.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course. He’s in everything else. Why shouldn’t he be in this as well? Of course.” He shook his head, letting the tunic drop from his hands and fishing out his smallclothes as well. “It seems I am doomed never to escape him.”

But even as he said it, he knew he could not truly blame Hawke for this. It had been his own doing—from putting the scrap of red into the basin with his other clothes to deciding to wear the cursed thing in the first place. Hawke hadn’t asked him to wear it, he thought with a sudden, startling clarity as he pulled it from the water. Hawke hadn’t asked for anything beyond whatever he wanted to give.

Fenris gazed down for a long time at the cloth in his hand. Then, with a faint, fond, exasperated sigh, he squeezed the water from it and knotted it—still damp—around his wrist.

He eyed his other clothes, then shrugged to himself. Worn under his armour, they would be covered entirely. No one else would ever have to see this particular evidence of his folly.

“At least Isabela is not likely to guess this one,” he muttered, gathering them up and walking back upstairs to let them dry by the fire.


End file.
